Dr. John Macleod's rebuilding of Govan Parish Church marked the culmination
of 70 years of architectural development towards a more dignified setting for
Presbyterian, and particularly Established Church, worship. In Govan, the
problems of combining a good auditorium for preaching with convincing
neo-mediaeval architectural forms had at least been reconciled. At almost
every stage, the resolution of these problems was closely related to trends
in Anglican, Episcopal and Roman Catholic Church design. This paper, therefore,
sets these out in parallel.

The church which Macleod replaced was a Georgian gothic rectangle with a spire,
designed by the amateur architect James Smith of Jordanhill in 1825 and still
sufficiently esteemed to be first thought worth reconstruction and eventually
re-erection as Elder Park Parish Church. It was rather old-fashioned by the
date it was built, stylistically half in the Georgian gothick idiom of the
earliest years of the century and half in the more up-to-date neo-Perpendicular
idiom of the 1810s and 1820s. Prior to about 1815, the average presbyterian
church building, whether classical or gothic, had comprised a large
single-span rectangle with the pulpit in the centre of one of the longer
walls facing a U-plan gallery on timber or cast-iron columns, an arrangement
which produced a standard elevation of two large windows flanking the pulpit,
flanked in turn by smaller openings at ground floor and gallery levels. Only
in a few more architectural examples, notably Allan Dreghorn's St. Andrew's
Parish Church, Glasgow ( 1739-56 ), James Gibb's West St. Nicholas, Aberdeen
( 1755 ) and James Playfair's Barony, Kirriemuir ( 1789 ) were arcades or
colonnades and a more processional arrangement with the communion table at the
far end of the long axis attempted, but in the early years of the century,
notably at William Stark's St. George's, Glasgow ( 1807 ) there was a tendency
to locate the pulpit there even in simple single-span churches. Though less
efficient for hearing the preacher, the arrangement had a less crowded and
more devotional atmosphere.

In the late 18th and earliest 19th century, ecclesiastical gothic was not
much more than a matter of making the arches pointed. The steeples of
Eaglesham ( 1788 ), Comrie ( John Stewart, 1805, Plate 1 ), Crimond ( 1812 )
and Forfar ( Samuel Bell and Patrick Brown, 1814 ) parish churches still
followed essentially Gibbsian models with their octagonal belfry stages.
The large Y-traceried windows with timber sashes flanking the pulpit were
little different from those fitted to provincial classical churches of the
same date. Rather closer to mediaeval gothic forms was the pinnacled square
tower of Richard Crichton's parish church at Craig ( 1799 ) which was,
very exceptionally, also distinguished by an interior rib-vaulted in plaster.
But, pretty though they were, the details of the doorpiece and the
pinnacles of the tower drew upon the publications of Batty Langley half a
century earlier rather that on original mediaeval examples. Occasionally
centralised octagonal plans were adopted to secure a better preaching
space as originally at Eaglesham ( 1788 ), John Paterson's baronial gothick
churches at St. Paul's, Perth ( 1807 ) and Fetteresso at Stonehaven ( 1810 )
and at Archibald Elliot's Glenorchy ( 1811 ), all more influenced by
Mr. Wesley's chapels rather than by mediaeval chapter houses.

Plate 1

None of these was convincingly neo-mediaeval. But in the second decade
of the 19th century, expectations of architectural scholarship greatly
increased, a trend which can be directly linked to John Britton's
Architectural Antiquities published from 1805 onwards, a book which found
a place in most country house libraries and enabled clients as well as
architects to be better informed. Its plates gave ready access to gothic
detail in a way that Fracis Grose's plates of Scottish antiquities had not
and resulted in English gothic, and particularly Tudor gothic, rather than
the native gothic which might have been directly observed, becoming as
universal in Scotland as it was in England.

The new trend was first apparent in country churches built for discerning
landed gentlemen but soon spread to the burghs. In 1813, a correct
neo-perpendicular church was built at Collace, its external form being
adapted from Britton's plate of Bishop Skirlaugh's chapel. Its probably
authorship by James Gillespie Graham is not yet confirmed but it
inaugurated a long series of churches designed by him on the same model
at Clackmannan ( 1815 ), Muthill ( 1826 ) and elsewhere. Not all of them
have the merit of the Collace church, the proportions being variously
expanded in length and width according to the requirements of the
congregation. Essentially similar, but more consistently well detailed, were
Dacid Hamilton's Erskine Parish Church, following closely on Collace in
1814, the same architect's St. John's Parish Church, Glasgow ( 1816, Plate 2 )
and Larbert Parish Church ( 1817 ) and William Stirling's Lecropt Parish
Church ( 1826 ).

Plate 2

Similar again, but less sophisticated in detail with wood tracery, were the
more ambitious of John Smith's churches in the north-east from 1821 onwards.
All of these were single-span churches, mostly with horseshoe galleries
centred on a pulpit at the far end of the long axis. Similarly indebted to
Britton was Gillespie Graham's parish church at Alloa ( 1817 ) with a spire
adapted from his plate of Louth, which Gillespie Graham repeated on a much
larger scale at Montrose in 1832. Gillespie Graham also set the pace for the
more ambitious urban churches of the period. His St. Mary's Roman Catholic
Chapel ( now Cathedral ) in Edinburgh ( 1814 ) inaugurated a long series
of churches in which a simple single-span rectangle was masked by a
neo-Perpendicular 'nave-and-aisles' front. Much more ambitious was his
St. Andrew's Roman Catholic Chapel ( now Cathedral ) in Glasgow, also of
1814, which had a 'college chapel' front, aisled and clerestoried nave and
plaster rib vaults ( Plate 3 ). Still more ambitious were two aisled and
clerestoried Edinburgh churches built for Episcopal congregations, Archibald
Elliot's St. Paul's with its fine 'timber' ( actually plaster ) ceilings
and William Burn's St. John's with its elaborate plaster fan vaults, both
1816: as originally designed the tower of St. John's was modelled on that
designed by Thomas Harrison for St. Nicholas, Liverpool ( 1811 ), a
discriminating choice as few would then be aware of the work of that
Chester-based master.

Plate 3

St. Andrew's, St. Paul's and St. John's were to remain unmatched for many
years. Except perhaps for St. Mary's, Haddington, where Archibald Elliot and
James Burn raised the mediaeval arcades to accomodate galleries in 1811,
only at a single country church, Kincardine-in-Menteith, built for the
Home-Drummonds of Blair-Drummond by Richard Crichton in 1816, was the
clerestoried nave and aisles formula adopted for a Church of Scotland
building.

In the 1830s and 1840s there was a considerable vogue for neo-Norman,
most notably at James Gillespie Graham's Parish church at Errol ( 1831 )
and Roman Catholic Chapel of St. Anthony the Eremite at Murthly ( 1846,
Plate 4 ); Thomas Hamilton's large parish church at Alyth ( 1839 ); John
Henderson's North Church at Stirling ( 1841 ); and David Cousin's St.
Thomas's Church of England and St. Cuthbert's Free Churches in Edinburgh
( both 1843 ), the last subsequently re-erected as Stockbridge Free Church.
Of these, the Chapel of St. Anthony the Eremite is, as Dr. McKinstry has
already pointed out, of some relevance to Govan inasmuch as its wide-naved,
narrow-chanceled plan form may have provided the inspiration for one of its
prototypes, the Catholic Apostolic Church in Edinburgh, of which more
later.

Plate 4

William Burn has also adopted neo-Norman in a simple form at Morton Church
( 1839 ) and in a number of smaller country churches. But by the late 1830s,
Burn had come to have a marked preference for Early English, most notably
at West Church, Dalkeith ( 1840 ) and Langholm ( 1842 ), both for the Duke
of Buccleuch venturing into mid-Decorated with late 15th century Scottish
arcades in his remarkable rebuilding of St. Mary's Parish Church, Dundee
( 1844 ) a galleried solution similar to Elliot's reconstruction of St.
Mary's, Haddington, 33 years earlier. Burn's details drew upon his
experience in reconstructing St. Giles', Edinburgh in 1829.

The early Decorated style favoured by the Tractarian movement had made one
pioneer appearance earlier, at Thomas Rickham's St. David's Ramshorn Glasgow
( 1824 ), a church otherwise of simple T-plan form with a frontal tower.
But, in general, the neo-Perpendicular style introduced by Gillespie Graham,
David Hamilton, Elliot and Burn in the second decade of the century remained
the norm for better class church design throughout the country until the
late 1840s, the most common type being the single-span rectangle masked by
a 'nave-and-aisles' front in which the 'aisles' demarcated the gallery stairs.
It served for all the Presbyterian denominations, Catholics and Episcopalians
alike, with differences only in the disposition of the gallery and furnishing.
But at William Burn's large neo-Perpendicular parish churches at Thurso ( 1833 )
and Minnigaff ( 1836 ) and his assistant David Bryce's even more ambitious
church at Monkton ( 1837 ) the familiar flat-ceilinged single-span form was
superceded by slim cast-iron colonnades bearing plaster rib-vaults, a type of
church design which reached its finest expression in James Brown's 'United
Presbyterian Cathedral', the Westminster Tudor gothic Renfield Street Church
of 1849. But, by the 1820s transepts had become a feature of better class
Established Church design as they provided convenient T or Greek Cross plan
forms. William Burn's Dunfermline Abbey ( 1821 ) designed to recover something
of the lost crossing and choir of the mediaeval abbey church, pioneered the
type, which was extensively adopted not only by Burn but by Gillespie
Graham at Errol and Greenside, Edinburgh ( 1838 ) and by Thomas Hamilton
at Alyth.

The progression of the gothic revival from the neo-Perpendicular churches of
the reigns of George IV and William IV to correct Early Decorated and
Early English forms drawn from the wide range of published material, including
A. W. N. Pugin's own designs for modern churches, was at first primarily
a markedly upper class Episcopal Church movement. Secular clients tended to
prefer Renaissance, neo-classical and baronial models. But although many
congregations, particularly United Presbyterian ones, also preferred classical
models as being without Episcopal or Catholic connotations, the Early
Decorated style of the Tractarian movement was gradually adopted by all
Presbyterian denominations and towards the end of the century Episcopal
church planning had a considerable influence on Presbyterian church design.

Tractarian gothic was a development more associated with a new generation of
architects rather than with established figures. David Bryce could be a
skilful designer in the new idiom as can be seen at his reconstruction of the
Parish Church of St. Nicholas, Dalkeith ( 1851 ) which probably reflected
the wishes of the Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch rather than those of the
congregation. Their personal tastes can be seen at the slightly earlier Early
English Episcopal Chapel of St. Mary nearby, designed by Burn and Bryce and
built in 1844-54. But the Scottish leader of the Tractarian movement in
architecture, as against the major London architects invited across the
Border, was John Henderson, a pupil of Thomas Hamilton. The contrast between
the hybrid gothic spire he added to the parish church at Arbroath in 1839 to
his pure English Early Decorated St. Mary's Episcopal Church ( 1847 ) in the
same town is marked indeedl. Henderson was, however, rarely entrusted with
really large churches despite his impressive performance at Trinity
College, Glenalmond ( begun 1843 ) where he began a great Oxford college in
the Perthshire countryside, the completion of which fell to George Gilbert
Scott.

Scott was not the first major Tractarian architect to cross the Border. That
distinction belongs to William Butterfield who made his debut rather earlier
with a minor work, St. John's Episcopal School, Jedburgh ( 1844 ) before
going on to design the Episcopal Cathedral on the Isles of Cumbrae and St.
Ninian's Episcopal Cathedral at Perth, both begun in 1849 and financed by the
Hon. G. F. Boyle, later the Earl of Glasgow. Benjamin Ferrey was the next to
make an appearance, at Holy Cross Episcopal Church, Melrose in 1846. Scott
made his first serious appearance at Dundee 3 years later with his tall-spired
Episcopal Church ( later Cathedral ) of St. Paul for Bishop Forbes, the
continental hall church and nave and aisleless apse of which has echoes of
his Nicholaikirche scheme for Hamburg. His ex-assistants, William Hay and
Henry Edward Coe, had settled in Canada, designed the very original
saddleback towered church of St. John at Longside ( 1853 ) while on a visit
to his mother. Coe came to Scotland as a result of his competition win for the
giant Tudor collegiate Infirmary at Dundee ( 1852 ). In the same city, he also
secured commissions for the 15th century English manorial Farington Hall ( 1853 )
and, more significantly for the purposes of this paper, the Episcopal Church
of St. Mary Magdalene, not large but remarkable for its adoption of the
so-called Gerona plan, in which the nave encompassed the width of the
chancel and its aisles, a plan form which was soon to be significant in
Scottish church design and to that of Govan in particular ( Plate 5 ).

Plate 5

A better-known pupil of Scott's, George Frederick Bodley, was responsible for
another of Bishop Forbes' Dundee churches, the plain but richly-stencilled
St. Salvador's, built for his chaplain in 1868. Much larger than St. Mary
Magdalene's, it was a broad-naved church with narrow passage aisles which
anticipated those of Govan. Like Govan, it was a preaching church for a
working class congregation.

The Roman Catholic Church was a major builder of Pugin-inspired churches in
much the same vein but had no equivalent to John Henderson. Nearly all its
major commissions went across the Border. A. W. N. Pugin never built the
cathedral planned for Edinburgh but, illicitly, he did design the Catholic
Apostolic Church in Glasgow ( 1852 ). His son, Edward, built St. Mary's,
Leith ( 1852 ) and the much finer church at Glenfinnan; Joseph Hansom St.
David's, Dalkeith ( 1853 ) and St. Mary's Lochee, at Dundee ( 1865 ), the latter
a very original design with an octagonal tower chancel like his St. Wilfrid's
at Ripon; William Wardell the Immaculate Conception, Kelso ( 1857 ) and the
much more ambitious Our Lady and St. Andrew's, Galashiels ( 1856 ); and George
Goldie St. Mary's, Lanark ( 1856, largely rebuilt since ), Our Lady of the
Garioch and St. John's, Fetternear ( 1859 ), and the unfinished St. Mungo's
Townhead, Glasgow ( 1866 ) and St. Mary's, Greenock ( 1862 ).

Deeply sensitive of his honour as a church designer, James Kyle, Bishop of
the Northern District, rose to the challenge at the twin-spired St. Peter's,
Buckie ( 1857 ), a dramatic change from his basic Georgian gothic chapels of
a few years earlier. Most of these had aisled naves with arcades and clerestory
but none, except for St. Andrew's, Galshiels, was a wide-span preaching church
such as were to influence Govan later.

Rather surpisingly, the newly-established Free Church, which had initially
rushed up very cheap gothic and Italianate churches to standard plans,
proved an important patron of Tractarian architecture, at least in so far as
external appearances were concerned. In the 1850s, the wealthier congregations
began to replace them with edifices which would be a visible challenge to
the Established Church. The architects particularly favoured were John, James
Murdoch and William Hardie Hay, Borderers who had settled in Liverpool.
Their South Church, Stirling ( 1851 ) was little different from Episcopal and
Catholic churches of the period with tall arcades and a clerestory but more
usually their churches are wide single-span structures with laminated timber
trusses which externally look as if they might have a nave and aisles under
an overall roof. The Hays excelled in the design of spires, ranging from the
orthodox, but excellently profiled Well Park, Greenoock ( 1853 ), to the
very original West Church, Helensburgh ( 1856 ) and former St. Columba's,
Brechin ( 1855 ). The last of these also shows a very original use of materials
being built of polygonally squared 'land stones' and roofed with very large
slates. Equally innovative, and worth a mention, even if not relevant to Govan
was their small Anglo-Saxon church at Tarfside ( 1859 ) which was built of
herringbone masonry.

J.T. Emmet was another English architect who built for Presbyterian
congregations. His churches, the tall-spired Bath Street Independent ( i.e.,
Congregational ) Church, Glasgow ( 1849, now Renfield St. Stephen's ),
Wilton Church, Hawick ( 1861 ), since enlarged, and Sandyford Church, Glasgow
( 1854 ) were all directly inspired by Pugin inside and out. The last was
completed by John Honeyman and was to have a significant effect on his designs
for both Episcopal and Presbyterian churches in the 1860s and early 1870s.

By the 1860s, some congregations of the Free and United Presbyterian church
had acquired stronger tastes in their desire to express their triumph over
the Established Church. These were met by Frederick Thomas Pilkington, the son
of the Stamford Methodist architect, Thomas Pilkington who had moved his
practise to Crieff in 1853. Shortly thereafter, he transferred it to
Edinburgh, Ferederick studying at the University where he was Hamilton
Prizewinner in logic. After 3 years of designing quite innovative housebuilding
at Inchglas, Crieff ( 1859 ) and Broomhill, Burntisland ( 1858 ), Frederick
toured the continent and recommenced practise in 1861, exhibiting ideal
preaching church designs in a Ruskin-inspired Franco-Italian gothic with
strongly textured stonework tinged with polychromy. Astonishingly, he even
found congregations, which only a decade or two earlier had been scared to even
have a bell, adventurous enough to finance these gargantuan structures with
fantastic roof structures and unfamiliar plan forms, truncated diamonds at
Trinity, Irvine ( 1861 ), Penicuik South ( 1862 ) and St. John's, Kelso ( 1865 )
and apple-shaped at Barclay, Edinburgh ( 1862 ). All of these were
characterised by big-scaled naturalistic carving of the Oxford Museum school,
much of it sculpted by a Mr. Pearce.

Pilkington was not the only Edinburgh architect to cater for those with robust
tastes. John Dick Peddie and Charles G. H. Kinnear, better known as classical
and baronial designers respectively, were responsible for Pilrig Free Church,
Edinburgh, with its tall spire, double transepts with aggressive mincer plate
tracery in the Samuel Sanders Tuelon manner, built in 1861-63. Of the same
family, but plainer, is their Hope Park United Presbyterian Church, St.
Andrews of 1864. In the following decade, Peddie and Kinnear were responsible
for a number of Germanic Romanesque churches of which Bonnygate Unite
Presbyterian at Cupar ( 1876 ) and East Linton Free ( 1879 ) survive. Whether
or not these churches reflect the fact that both architects were indefatigable
continental travellers, or the completion of the architectural education of
the younger Peddie, John More Dick Peddie, in Germany is difficult to say.

Robert Thornton Shiells was another Edinburgh specialist in continental
Romanesque, but his best churches in that vein, the Italian Marshall Street
Baptist Church, Edinburgh ( 1877 ) and Buccleuch Street, Dalkeith ( 1879 )
have both now vanished.

In Aberdeenshire, Pilkington's counterpart was the much younger John
Bridgeford Pirie, architect of the extraordinary French gothic of South
Free Church, Fraserburgh ( 1878 ) and Queen's Cross Free Church, Aberdeen
( 1881 ), the interiors of which are, however, of orthodox galleried plan.
Pirie was not so powerful a designer as Pilkington, but his details often
show even greater originality.

n Glasgow, the key figures were John Honeyman who had returned from Burn's
office in London in 1856, J. J. Stevenson who returned from George Gilbert
Scott's in the late 1850s and William Leiper who had returned from the
London practices of J. L. Pearson and William White in or about 1864. Of
these, Honeyman was relatively conservative, preferring to follow English
models while Stevenson followed Street into Italian gothic and Leiper
Burges and Godwin into Early French. Each had a different solution to the
problem of preaching church design. At the Free West, later St. Mark's,
Greenback, Greenock ( 1861 ) and at the tall-spired Lansdowne United
Presbyterian Church, Glasgow ( 1862 ), Honeyman adopted wide naves with
galleries and passage aisles screened off by panelling. However different
in planning, these broad-naved narrow-aisled preaching churches were not
without relevance to the design of the nave at Govan later.

At Trinity Free Church, Charlotte Street, Glasgow and his tall-spired Park Free
Church at Helensburgh ( both 1862 ) he adopted the Puginian triple-aisled
plan of Emmet's Sandyford, little different from his own Anglican St. Silas,
Glasgow ( 1863 ) but, as originally fitted out, both with central pulpits.
Trinity differed from the other other two in having slim cast-iron arcades
supporting galleries, but at Park which has good masonry arcades without
galleries perhaps he foresaw how the liturgy of the Presbyterian church
in Scotland would change.

Stevenson's Italian Gothic Kelvinside Free Church ( 1862 ) represented a
more typical solution to the problem, little different in principle from
Renfield, with slim cast-iron columned arcades bearing galleries at
mid-shaft. Its apse contained not the chancel but the gallery stair, a
solution also adopted by Honeyman at his now lost Partick Free High Church
( 1869 ) in Hamilton Crescent.

Rather similar internally to Kelvinside was James Salmon's elaborately
polychrome interior at Anderston Established Church, Glasgow ( 1864 ) in which
his son William Forrest, who was like Stevenson, an assistant of G. G. Scott,
probably had a hand. It was built for Mr. Marshall Lang, a pioneer of
liturgical improvement, and had an organ from the start. Both churches
reflected the influence of G. E. Street rather than Scott.

Leiper's Dowanhill Church, Glasgow ( 1865 ) reflected his stay at Pearson's
in its fine Northamptonshire spire, but the problem of providing a large
preaching space for a United Presbyterian congregation was overcome by
adopting the wide hammer beam roof of E. W. Godwin's Northampton Town Hall.

By the early 1870s, such solutions had ceased to satisfy the more
aesthetically-minded congregations. At St. Stephen's Established Church,
West Ferry, Dundee ( 1871 ), the English-trained architect Thomas Saunders
Robertson set the galleries in masonry arcades in the church he built for
Dr. James Cooper, later the moving spirit in the foundation of the Aberdeen
Ecclesiological Society. At St. Stephen's, Cooper became embroiled in an
interesting dispute with this architect. Cooper sought an apse for his organ
and central pulpit. Robertson held that he could only build a square chancel,
probably foreseeing that, as actually happened at Govan, it would be found
too short and have to be deepened if and when liturgical changes came.

The dispute ended with Cooper resigning and Robertson leaving the congregation.
Robertson was also responsible for another remarkable church in Dundee, the
twin-towered St. Enoch's Free Church of 1874 which went a step further in that
its low French gothic arcades contained no galleries. It too was the subject
of dispute, both minister and congregation deserting the Free Church for the
more tolerant Established Church in 1875.

At Camphill, Glasgow ( 1875 ), a UP Church, memorable for its great Normandy
gothic spire reminiscent of Pearson's at St. Augustine's, Kilburn, London,
Leiper sacrificed the single-span uninterrupted vision of his Dowanhill
Church to the insertion of good masonry arcades with galleries in the aisles
much as at Robertson's St. Stephen's. At Anderston Free ( 1876 ) and
Belhaven UP, Glasgow ( 1877 ), James Sellars went further and sacrificed the
gallery to a clerestory, as did William Forsyth MacGibbon in his fine
Normandy gothic Pollokshields East UP Church in Leslie Street, Glasgow ( 1882 )
which looked like the native of a vast incomplete abbey church and may indeed
have been intended to recall Paisley in its unrestored state.

Even more thorough-going were the new Parish Church at Crieff with its
Dunblane Cathedral front, nominally by the Crieff architect G. T. Ewing,
but probably borrowing from J. M. MacLaren's competition design, and the new
Free Church in the same town by J. J. Stevenson, now in London, which also
adopted the Dunblane tower. Both were built in 1882.

For those who still preferred an unbroken preaching space, the Sainte Chapelle
in Paris provided a convenient model, adopted at Sellars' Hillhead Established
Church ( 1875), where the idea is said to have come from his fellow
competitor, Leiper, and Robert Baldie's rather similar but long-destroyed
Kelvinside UP Church ( 1879 ), both in west-end Glasgow.

Wide preaching churches of the Honeyman and Dowanhill types were not, however,
peculiar to presbyterian congregations. G. G. Scott had provided a broad
nave and an apse on the Italian friars' church model at St. James Episcopal
Churdch, Leith in 1861. So had Mr. Frederick George Lee and Alexander Ellis,
it is said with the assistance of a scheme by G. E. Street, at their
polychrome Italian gothic St. Mary's Episcopal Church, Aberdeen in 1862
( Plate 6 ). The last reflected Street's design for the Crimea Memorial Church
which may have had some influence on the design of all of these broad-naved
churches.

Plate 6

Scott's executant architect at Leith St. James had been his ex-assistant
Robert Rowand Anderson who largely succeeded to the Scottish episcopal
church building connections of John Henderson when he died in 1862, notably
at the James Brooks-alike All Saints, Brougham Place, Edinburgh ( 1865 ) and
St. Andrew's Church, St. Andrews ( 1866 ) both with orthodox Tractarian
plans. But, at the giant Catholic Apostolic Church, Edinburgh ( begun 1873,
Plate 7 ), he adopted the friars' church plan of a broad nave embracing the
width of the chancel and its aisles ( Plate 8 ), which, in a more developed
form, provided the answer when the Scoto-Catholic minister of Govan, Dr.
John Macleod sought a solution to the problem of getting beauty into
Presbyterian worship with a preaching church in which the communion table
was set up in the chancel in the same central position as an episcopal altar,
an arrangement narrowly anticipated at Honeyman's fine Early English Merchiston
Establish Church ( now St. Michael's ), Edinburgh, 1882, and paralled at
Anderson's own new Parish Church at Glencorse, much smaller but with a neat
saddle-backed tower, in 1883.

Plate 7

Plate 8

Govan provided the model for J. J. Burnet's equally fine Barony Church, Glasgow
( 1886 ) where the competition was assessed by J. L. Pearson, who had adopted
the scheme himself in his magnificent vaulted church of St. John, Red Lion
Square, London in 1874 ( Plate 9 ). Anderson was later to adopt it again
himself at St. Paul's, Greenock ( 1890 ) but he resorted to conventional
English proportions at Morningside South Free Church in 1890.

Plate 9

Morningside has a fine lead spire, a feature also intended for his Greenock
church. Nevertheless, the Govan plan type had already quickly spread to the
Free Church at Hippolyte Blanc's St. Luke's West Ferry ( 1884 ) and
Perth Middle Church ( 1887 ) which formed the model for his gargantuan
St. Matthew's Established Church in Morningside, Edinburgh in 1889.

Within a few years, the influence of Macleod's movement, and of Principal
Cooper's Aberdeen Ecclesiological Society, soon to become the
Scottish Ecclesiological Society, resulted in the building of many more
Presbyterian churches on the same model with an increasing tendency towards
Scots mediaeval forms.

Despite his undisputed standing as the premier Episcopal church designer in
Scotland, Rowand Anderson was not among those invited to compete for the
greatest Scottish church building project of the age, St. Mary's Episcopal
Cathedral in Edinburgh. The Edinburgh architects selected to compete against
Scott, Burges and Street in 1872 were the architects to the Walker estate
which financed it, John Lessels and Peddie and Kinnear. The Inverness
architect Alexander Ross, author of the twin-towered Cathedral of St. Andrew
at Inverness ( 1866 ) was also invited, submitting a design largely by his
London collaborator, George Freeth Roper. The assessor, Ewan Christian,
recommended Street, but the chosen design, perhaps wisely, was that of Scott.
Neither of these had any relevance, except perhaps for some details at St.
Mary's, to presbyterian church design, but the second truly major church
building commission of the age, the Coats Memorial Baptist Church at Paisley
did.

Anderson was not among those selected to compete and the assessor,
James Sellars, preferred Blanc's design to Burnet's ( Plate 10 ) in 1885. As
at St. Mary's, the deciding factor was clearly a cathedral-like image with a
great central tower. Where Anderson and Burnet had solved the problem of the
wide preaching nave straightforwardly, Blanc solved it by architectural
sleight of hand, in taking his oblong crossing to a square crown tower at
roof level with a chancel of conventional proportions beyond.

Plate 10

In the event, Burnet had a rather wider influence on later 19th century
church design than Anderson. It was a period of great liturgically-designed
memorial churches. The design of Burnet's Barony Church ( Plate 11 ) was in
varying degrees reflected in several major churches, perhaps most notably
at his partner John A. Campbell's exactly contemporary Shawlands Parish Church
( 1885-89 ) and at T. G. Abercrombie's Clark Memorial Church at Largs ( 1892 )
at which Abercrombie was assisted by Burnet's ex-assistant William Kerr.

Plate 11

In the big roofed, low-walled churches with sturdy towers and mixed late
Gothic and Romanesque motifs Burnet designed at St. Molio's, Shiskine ( 1886 ),
Dundas UP, Grangemouth ( 1894 ), the Gardner Memorial at Brechin ( 1896 ) and
the Maclaren Memorial at Stenhousemuir ( 1897 ), Burnet introduced a markedly
Scottish character constrasted with English Tudor half-timbered porches.

Uniquely, the Gardner Memorial has a rood beam, indicating how far liturgical
change was thought likely to go. Correspondence at Grangemouth reveals that
Burnet favoured the type because they were inexpensive to construct leaving
funds available for high-quality detail.

Other Glasgow architects, notably W. G. Rowan and H. E. Clifford, followed his
lead at St. Margaret's, Tollcross and St. Michael's, Carntyne respectively
( both 1902 ). The type soon spread elsewhere, a particularly good example
being Thomas & Wilkie's Free Church at Edzell ( 1900 ), now destroyed. Although
taller and shorter to fit the site, Charles Rennie Mackintosh's Queen's
Cross Free Church, Glasgow ( 1898 ) has points in common with these churches.
Like Burnet's Gardner Memorial, it has a rood beam, recently reinstated.

The 1880s saw, for the first time, a more conscious attention to Scottish
rather than English and French models. Surprisingly the trend had begun
with the English architect Sir George Gilbert Scott at St. Mary's, Edinburgh
which drew upon features from Holyrood, Dunblane, Elgin and Jeburgh, as well
as northern English sources. The adoption of the Dunblane front by Stevenson
and Ewing at Crieff and by Burnet and Campbell at Barony and Shawlands,
observed earlier, was echoed throughout the land at a considerable number of
churches, great and small, not least at Burnet's own West Church, Port
Glasgow, and Arbroath Old.

Anderson's borrowings at Govan were less obvious. The tall, spare lancets of
the gable front at Govan are Scottish, though whether adapted from the transept
front at Kilwinning or the west front of Beauly is difficult to say. The stepped
hoodmould linking them appears to have been taken from the monastic buildings
at Dryburgh. The chancel gable was adopted from the transept gable at
Pluscarden. The round tower proposed in some of his schemes and for Govan,
although anticipated by William Burges in his designs for Temple Brady in
Ireland, was a conscious tribute to the antiquity of the site. Anderson
proposed another such tower for St. Margaret's Roman Catholic Church,
Dunfermline ( 1894 ) but it too remained unbuilt. It was left to MacGregor
Chalmers to take up the theme.

The revival of the more characteristic late Scots gothic forms came
surprisingly late, despite the excellent illustrations provided by Billings.
Only Bryce had adopted it with his experience of Edinburgh's Trinity College
Church in mind, successfully at the Parish Church of Carnwath ( 1866 ) and
not very successfully at the Parish Church of St. Mungo ( 1875 ). Surprisingly,
the first major late Scots Gothic building, the crown-towered St. Leonard's-in-the-Fields
Free Church at Perth ( 1885 ) was designed from London by J. J. Stevenson,
who later designed the Stevenson Memorial, Glasgow and the Peter Memorial
Church, Stirling, in the same vein.

Thereafter, the late Scots gothic manner was taken up enthusiastically
by a number of architects. Had it been completes as originally designed,
one of the best of these would have been St. Margaret's Established Church in
Barnhill, Dundee, designed by the Aberdeen architect Charles Carmichael
( who sadly died young in Johannesburg ) for a follower of Principal Cooper,
Mr. T. Newbiggin Adamson. In completed form, it would have resembled the
Collegiate Church at Biggar, although some of its details were drawn from
Whitekirk.

Like Peyton at St. Luke's Free, a few miles to the west, Adamson was soon
embroiled in litigation. Mr. Jacob Primmer of Dunfermline descended on the
church to investigate reports of high church liturgy, a matter which
occupied the attention of the General Assembly for several years. Beautifying
the worship of the Established Church was still not without its hazards.

More imaginative essays in the late Scots gothic manner were John Kinross'
Roman Catholic Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour at Chapeltown,
Glenlivet ( 1897 ), Sidney Mitchell's reconstruction of the Parish Church at
Chirnside ( c.1908 ), Lorimer's pupil Ramsay Traquair's Christian Science Church,
Inverleith, Edinburgh ( 1910 ); and Reginald Fairlie's Our Lady and St.
Meddan's Roman Catholic Church, Troon ( 1911 ), all with oblong towers; and,
most ambitiously of all, the Aberdeen architect Alexander Marshall Mackenzie's
cathedral-like Lowson Memorial Established Church, Forfar ( 1912 ) with its
central St. Monance spire and Duffus-like manse. Although the overall effect
was perhaps English rather than Scottish, late Scots gothic detail is also
evident in two outstandingly fine episcopal churches by the London-based
architect John Ninian Comper who had Aberdonian origins at St. Margaret's,
Braemar ( 1898 ) and St. Mary's, Kirriemuir ( 1904 ).

Scottish also in origin were the Romanesque churches built for Established
Church congregations by Dr. Peter MacGregor Chalmers, a pupil of
John Honeyman, though not all of them received the St. Rule and Brechin towers
intended for them. Complete examples can be seen at St. Ninian's, Prestwick
( 1908 ), St. Leonard's, Dunfermline ( c.1900 ) and Kirn ( 1906 ). A
particularly fine example, elaborating the Dalmeny model, is St. Leonard's,
St. Andrews ( 1902 ) ( Plate 12 ). Some of his later churches show marked
continental influence, Italian at St. Anne's, Corstorphine and German at
St. Margaret's, Newlands ( 1912 ).

Plate 12

In Dundee, Frank Thomson worked in the same vein at St. John's Cross ( 1912 ),
close to Govan and Barony on plan with double arches at the transepts.
St. John's was echoed in a late example in the same city, Craigiebank ( 1937-39 ).

Sydney Mitchell's cathedral-like Crichton Memorial Chirch at Chrichton Royal
Hospital Dumfries ( 1890 ), the greatest ecclesiastical commission of the
1890s, was unaffected by this new sense of Scottish identity in church design,
as indeed were most of his churches which tended to follow Rowand Anderson's
late gothic models, most notably at Belford Free Church ( 1888 ) and Candlish
Free Church ( 1900 ) both in Edinburgh. As with his domestic work, some are
strong in concept but indifferent in execution reflecting his over-large
practice. A few of his late churches, Port Ellen ( 1898 ) and the very
remarkable Chalmers Memorial United Free Church, Cockenzie ( 1904 ), are
unusual in that they reflect Scandinavian influence.

Like the art-nouveau neo-perpendicular of Mackintosh's Queen's Cross Free
Church, and of W. D. MacLennan's much more wayward St. George's UF ( now
St. Matthew's ) Paisley ( 1904 ), the Scandinavian originality of Mitchell's
Chalmers Church was a turn of the century counterpart to the churches of
Pilkington, Pirie and the Peddies in the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s. It is
noticeable that virtually all of these churches were built for Free and
United Presbyterian, and after the merger of 1900, United Free Church
congregations.

Stylistically, Established and Episcopal church building tended to remain
rooted firmly within the English and Scottish neo-mediaeval traditions. By
the end of the first decade of the new century, there was little to distinguish
new United Free church buildings from those of the Established Church either
in style plan or furnishing. The revolution initiated by Macleod and Anderson
was complete. It was no doubt one of the considerations in Burnet's mind when
he persuaded the Royal Institute of British Architects to aware the 82 year old
Anderson the Royal Gold Medal in 1916. Burnet's own memorial chapel at the
University of Glasgow ( designed 1913, built 1923-27 ) was his final tribute
to the Govan ideal.

In this paper, which has been developed from the relevant sections of my
1990-1991 Rhind lectures, The Revival of Mediaeval and Early Renaissance
Architecture in Scotland, 1745-1929, I have tried to complement Dr.
Sam McKinstry's excellent paper The Architecture of Govan Old Parish Church
published in the Second Annual Report.

The Rhind lectures were commissioned as a centenary tribute to Rowand Anderson's
Findlay Building comprising the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and the
National Museum of Antiquities, which, together with the same architect's
Mount Stuart, represented the supreme achievement of the Gothic revival in
Scotland insofar as secular architecture was concerned. Much the same could
be said of Govan and Barony, even if they are much less elaborate than
Coats Memorial. But, whereas the Findlay Building and Mount Stuart were the
last of their kind, Govan Old was both an end and a beginning. It transformed
Scottish Presbyterian church planning as no building had done before, or is
ever likely to do again.